


spiderwebs

by bebitched



Category: Lost
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-28
Updated: 2008-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-02 10:28:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bebitched/pseuds/bebitched
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>She must have spoken the word aloud a million times, but her brain is frozen in contractions of incomplete thoughts and she finds her tongue utterly blank.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	spiderwebs

**Author's Note:**

> This is it, guys. I've been working on this for the _longest_ time. It gets a bit abstract at times, but really I hope you give it a try because this fic is my baby. Thanks to **slybrunette** for the beta! 

 

There’s a nest of darkness burrowing into her eyes, threatening to swarm into her mind completely if she doesn’t fight to stay awake. She can feel the tingle in her extremities, the barely reassuring sensation that she hasn’t torn into a million pieces. She struggles against unconsciousness.

 

She can hear screaming, that much she registers, and she tries to latch onto the sound in the hope it will keep her afloat. Tightening her hold on the tiny squirming bundle in her arms she thinks of her mother and her baby and of Charlie and shuns any trace of fear until she can see its back and she will not let go. She can’t. But then there’s the whoosh of air pushing in resistance against solid, a blinding pain, then nothing.

 

Claire feels nothing.

 

\---

 

The first thing she notices is the white. Like the world paled in response to same grave horror, blood deserting it all, and she has a feeling that it won’t be coming back anytime soon. She doesn’t open her eyes.

 

But then she feels the restraints. Canvas straps holding her left wrist, tethering her to this supposed reality instead of the one she much prefers behind her eyelids and before she can question herself she blinks. Her line of sight traces the length of her arm down to the yellowing fabric and she’s almost glad because the blankness of the room is beginning to get to her and she doesn’t think she could take it if the white had reached out and grabbed a hold of her too. But it’s only her left wrist, she thinks, and she’s sorry that she does because her vision follows that train of thought too and she’s met with nothing.

 

No restraints, no bruises, no stretch of fingers or flex of muscles or twist of sinews, just sheets and more white and she shifts away from it all.

 

She should have two matching arms, like Adam and Eve, a pair of limbs to help her grasp on. But she doesn’t. There’s one missing, a piece of her that’s gone, left her here all alone. It feels like there should be some other part too, that there should be something else connected to her shoulder, in her arms, beyond blood and muscle and bone.

 

But it’s gone and she’s gone and she doesn’t have time to make sense of it all before she falls under again. This time she doesn’t fight it.

 

\---

 

_“Fuck. I need some help over here!”_

_“What happened? Is that blood?”_

_“The bastards took her arm clean off. They grabbed her before I could stop ‘em. The kid’s gone too.”_

_“Jesus.”_

_“Well don’t just stand there! Help me move-“_

_The jungle brush crunches in an unsettling thump as two bodies hit the ground, advancing footsteps, a helicopter over head, disappearing into the space black and empty surrounding her._

 

“Margaret.”

 

“Wake up, Margaret.”

 

A light.

 

“You need to wake up, Margaret.”

 

The groan in her throat comes from someplace guttural and reflexive as she shifts her legs under the sheets.

 

“That’s better. Can you open your eyes for me?”

 

She does, on instinct, hoping that this voice that appears calm and in control will provide answers. Or at least the questions, because she’s not really sure on those either.

 

“Good. Now can you tell me your name?”

 

Her lips move in a soundless whisper, hoping the muscles will know what the mind no longer does. She must have spoken the word aloud a million times, but her brain is frozen in contractions of incomplete thoughts and she finds her tongue utterly blank.

 

_Hello my name is…_

 

Nothing.

 

Something.

 

The woman who had prompted her earlier turns to someone unseen and whispers snippets of phrases that she catches in the air.

 

_Just like the others_… _no memories_… _blank slate_…

 

The last part makes her swallow. _Blank_. The word scares her in the way that only the thought of starting from scratch on a clean canvas really can.

 

\---

 

She only truly realizes how alone she is once she notices that there are others in the room. She traces the quiet tapping coming from the next bed over behind the curtain, something unmelodic and annoyed, plastic on metal. At first she squints as if the movement will give her x-ray vision and the ability to see through the filmy fabric to the other side, because she’s trying to remember who she is and it’s too complicated a task to perform when you’re being distracted by someone else’s nervous ticks.

 

“Excuse me? Do you mind stopping that? I’m trying to sleep and that tapping is very loud.”

 

She can hear the sound of flesh resting heavily on the bed and for a moment there’s silence. Almost too quiet.

 

“You got a cigarette you don’t mind sharin’?”

 

She frowns at the opposite wall, at the gruffness of his voice and his request.

 

“I don‘t think you’re supposed to smoke in here.”

 

“That wasn’t my question.”

 

He lets it hang there, probably knowing how uneasy this whole conversation is making her, because she may not know her name but she does know this isn’t the way it was supposed to go.

 

“You got a name, sweetheart?”

 

She thinks on that for a second, pulling in a breath and filtering it out slowly, as if the answer will get caught there between her lungs and her tongue.

 

“Not really.”

 

“Me neither,” and since she’d been expecting baffled silence and not agreement she sits there, chewing on her lips and swallowing down the words that were said so they can swill around inside of her.

 

\---

 

 

A week passes and they come to give her pills.

 

Clear solution for the pain. She watches the fluid rush into her IV bag and disappear in with the rest of the liquid.

 

White and crimson pills to sleep, peach to wake up.

 

A steady thrum of doctors and nurses and psychiatrists visit her in ripples, asking how she’s feeling, if she remembers anything else, if she can tell them how she lost her arm, and the questions crush her like waves, the empty substance of the foam leaving her breathless. She thumbs the edge of her hospital gown where it should meet her skin, the flesh of her upper arm. She’s got nothing and they tell her that it’s okay, that maybe it’ll come back to her someday. She thinks that seems a little crass, but maybe if she wasn’t so distraught she would notice that every time another person in a white lab coat leaves her room they look a little more relieved.

 

But she never sees him. They come to visit him too, the one who sleeps next to her, and she tries not to eavesdrop, she really does, but she catches snippets and often times their voices raise and she does notice that they don’t stay as long with him as they do with her. They always leave his bed with an expression of distaste and annoyance and she wonders what they want from him that they’re not getting.

 

It’s in this way that she discovers there’s a man two beds over as well, next to the one she’s spoken to. But they don’t like him very much either and she picks up on the fact that they need a translator half the time to understand him. This makes overhearing any details impossible and she tells herself that she’s not disappointed.

 

\---

 

“So they say that your name is Margaret.”

 

She blushes a little, knowing that he was listening to her in the same way that she was to him, but she shakes her head at the silly schoolgirl emotion and clears her throat.

 

“That’s what they tell me.”

 

“You’re not so sure?”

 

“Well I wouldn’t know, now would I?” She tries to convey playfulness but her tone is rapidly straining in her throat.

 

“Good point,” then, “The kid with the stethoscope tells me I’m Joe.”

 

“Well it’s very nice to meet you Joe. Informally of course.”

 

“Likewise.”

 

\---

 

_There’s a boat. A steady floor to rest her feet on if she ignores the gentle sway that gives the whole illusion of land away. _

_There’s fire. A great lock of flaming tongues that lick towards the sky in a desperate plea for rain from the above because she thinks it might die of thirst and she runs. She runs and she falls and the baby… the baby falls too. She screams his name into the night, but for some reason the word is static-y and she can’t hear herself speak. _

_There are faceless men hovering above her and they carry her away, to an island where there are no more trees and surrounded only by desert and an ocean of skulls. She cries. She cries and she is only cold. Cold. _

_Cold. _

_Cold.  _

_She can feel him in her arms. Arms. She had arms once. A blue blanket because… she doesn’t remember why blue of all colors but the logic follows orderly in her mind and she doesn’t want to trace the lines of reason for fear they might disappear all together. He’s warm. _

_She hears a rumbling like a freight train headed full speed and then there’s smoke. A giant pillar of black smoke that drags her away and rips things out of her mind. She tries to hold on, to clutch the memories tightly there because she’s supposed to be allowed to keep these things for herself, this time at least, and it’s stripping her clean. _

_The baby cries._

_She reaches for him, needs to know he was always real, but the wrapping caves under her touch and there’s nothing. Her hand seeks the solidness of him and it’s still warm pressed against her chest but she feels it and its blood. So much blood. She touches the tattered remains of her arm and she falls._

_The blanket isn’t blue anymore._

 

The sheets stick sweaty to her legs and she gasps, full and desperate.

 

“Nightmare, sweat pea?”

 

The voice doesn’t startle her, as if she’d been hearing it always, and she sighs back into her pillow.

 

“Just… nothing. It wasn’t anything.”

 

She begins to drift back, but then she hears him again.

 

“Sawyer.”

 

“What?”

 

“You kept saying ‘Sawyer”. Over and over again. Like it was a goddamn prayer.”

 

The name sits heavy between her eyes until morning.

 

She still hasn’t seen his face.

 

\---

 

The rain is playing percussion on her roof above them, trilling a steady beat that blends with the hum of the florescent lights, an odd melody of nature and nurture.

 

They take her out every now and again, let her walk the hallways of the hospital and pretend that touching the window panes is enough of a substitute for life.

 

The doctor bandages and re-bandages her arm, nodding at her reassuringly when he tells her it’s healing nicely, as if that will somehow make her feel better. _Time_, he says, like it means something substantial.

 

It’s when she’s coming back from one of her physical therapy sessions that she sees him for the first time. Well, see if she uses the term loosely. She hears him first. Recognizes the gruff in his voice, the Southern lilt to it that she can hear late at night when he mutters to himself or talks to her about nothing because neither of them know enough information to hold a meaningful conversation.

 

“Look Betty Boop, just give me the meds and we can walk away all nice like, without an old corral shooting or nothin’. Come on now, doctor’s orders.”

 

She sweeps his face, taking in the harsh stubble on his cheeks, the gash on his forehead, the haggard and prickly way his eyes probe the nurse, as if he’s looking for a way in. His blonde hair is shaggy and doesn’t appear as if he’s slept and she wonders if that has something to do with her.

 

“I’m sorry sir, but I need the doctor’s direct -- wait. Did you just say ‘Betty Boop’? As in the cartoon character? You’re chart says you’re a memory loss victim.” She appraises him all strange, like he just sprouted horns, and he stares back with equal confusion.

 

“Just… whatever. Get Dr. Mad Scientist’s approval. I’ll be waiting over here.”

 

He turns and if she’d had more warning… well she’s not really sure what she would have done. Run away maybe. But he’s looking at her like she’s some kind of mouse that just scurried in front him all naïve and crushable and he might just step on her if she’s not careful.

 

“Can I help you?”

 

He takes one look at the gaping space where her arm should be and glances back quickly, but less like he doesn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable and more like he doesn’t want to admit he’s interested in another person.

 

“Hello?”

 

She opens her mouth to speak but it translates somewhere between her brain and her lungs as a squeak instead, yet something in his expression changes and she can tell her recognizes her.

 

She mutters an apology and slips past him.

 

\---

 

“You didn’t tell me you were a cripple.”

 

It’s later that night, after they’ve left the jello and the mashed potatoes and seven other degrees of food she’s sick of. She just wants to cook for herself. Or, rather, learn to cook at all.

 

She shifts uncomfortably.

 

“I didn’t think it was important.”

 

“You’re walking around like a broken doll that got thrown around one too many times by a spoiled kid with a temper and you didn’t think it was worth mentioning?”

 

“I guess I didn’t think it would matter so much to you.”

 

He usually is so prompt with his retorts so she knows that she’s given him pause, made him think. Considering his track record, the feat in itself is rather impressive.

 

“It doesn’t.”

 

She smirks to herself, rolling over so that she’s facing him, resting on her good arm.

 

“Good.”

 

“I walk with a limp.”

 

Her eyelids flutter.

 

“You what?”

 

“It’s my damn leg. There’s something, I don’t know, not right with it, I guess? They tell me it must have happened sometime before they found me. But, anyway, I don’t walk quite right. If it makes you feel better about your arm.”

 

“It doesn’t.”

 

“Figured.”

 

There’s this strange tingle in her lips and her muscles flex upwards in a smile.

 

\---

 

It’s a week before they meet the other man. He’s quiet, all barely polite smiles and confused eyes and Korean words that neither of them understands, but some English breaks through as they sit at a round lunch table in the cafeteria.

 

They’d been going crazy in those beds, the itch to move so intense that they braved the shrill chastising of the nurses to see the sun and see people.

 

“Food.” The man says, Bae, she thinks his name was, and the word leaves a slightly bewildered smile on his face, so she nods and grins back.

 

“Food.”

 

People stare as they pass by the three, some hiding it better than others, and she knows they must look like toy soldiers after an epic battle with a cat, her with her one arm and Joe with his bad leg and Bae with the bandaged burn across his cheek and down his left side. She thinks that they should have some bond from the fact that they all have no memory of before, or their lives, their families, their personalities even, but she finds that it goes far deeper than she could describe.

 

There are some days where she feels like she knows them.

 

\---

 

She keeps seeing spiders out of the corner of her eyes. She’ll glance back and the wall will be bare but they’re everywhere now. Crawling on the backs of her eyelids, sinking little two-pronged teeth marks all over her mind.

 

She’s getting better, physically at least, and she can smile without the muscles in her cheeks feeling odd and out of place, but there’s an emptiness that haunts her, a phantom pain in a place she can’t feel.

 

“We might get out of here soon,” he says, something close to hope etching tin patterns all over his words. They keep the curtain between their beds open now, every time besides bedtime and naptime and bathtime (like they’re children who need to be baby sat and maybe they are) and she glances over at him. She forces what she hopes is happiness onto her face.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Well if not we can always break our way out.” She smiles wistfully at the ‘we’ but there’s a part of her that none of this happy can seem to reach.

 

He falls asleep but for some reason she can’t follow and she sees a black body and eight legs out of the corner of her eye. 

 

“Go away,” she begs, to no one in particular, and closes her eyes to it all.

 

\---

 

She runs her finger down the length of it: cotton bandage, plastic forearm, inanimate hand that feels more like a claw.

 

“Neat.”

 

He looks at her, strange and off-kilter and for a moment she thinks he might yell or cry or maybe throw something at her head.

 

“Neat? You got a hunk of plastic for an arm and you call it ‘neat’, like you’re a poodle-skirt dame right out of the 50’s?”

 

She furrows her forehead in confusion and maybe it’s because she feels like pissing him off right now, because then at least they’ll be in the same place.

 

“Why not? It’s just temporary until they can get me something more lifelike.”

 

He catches her by surprise when he pinches the index finger of the thing between his fingers, careful not to pull.

 

“Just… nothing. No reason.”

 

It isn’t until she’s falling asleep and she hears him mutter _it isn’t supposed to be this way_ that she really gets it.

 

\---

 

 

The grass crinkles oddly under her feet after so long tapping her way across linoleum, and she wobbles a little in the uncertainly of it before she takes a few more steps, sighing into the concrete when she reaches it and glancing back at them. There are nurses and doctors waving distractedly from the entrance of the hospital, but they go back inside before she can muster an appropriate emotion and return the gesture. But she isn’t alone. Bae stands ahead of her and Joe behind, something close to a military formation in the angling back of their shoulders and she knows they want to protect her, at least initially.

 

So she breaks ahead. Does a skip-jump combination with a grace she didn’t know she had so that she’s before them both, nothing but sky and trees and a parking lot laid out in front of her. She closes her eyes but lets him settle a hand on her forearm, tugging her back.

 

“Time to go, Sunshine.”

 

She smirks and it tastes like spring.

 

\---

 

Their apartment is small, something like a new born, all tiny appendages and not-quite developed features and she guesses if she was speaking metaphorically it would be appropriate. They live together, him and her, since it feels like they had always been under the same roof. In the hospital where she was born at twenty-three years old she had been beside him and anything else would seem abnormal.

 

They don’t have _things_ – sofas, appliances, toothpaste, a bed – like people at their age should, so they make do with what they can on the check the government wrote them to get started and improvise with the rest. It helps that they don’t have a frame of reference to go on, so they don’t miss things they never had.

 

The mattress store feels like a graveyard, coffins and headstones laid out flat and silent in the warehouse, and they stand there uncertain until a salesperson approaches them with the customary _can I help you?_ Joe is careful to watch their faces as they speak, somehow knowing that salesmen will try to swindle you if they sense your weakness and even though he’s just as clueless as she is, he protects her with a stern jaw and permeable smile and a _we’re not interested_ if necessary. But this time they let him show them around, pointing out springs and lifetime warrantees and foam.

 

They buy the cheapest because they figure they won’t be able to tell and that night they lie awake, silent and breathless, close to the floor but just high enough to see the stars out the window, waiting for something nameless to begin.

 

\---

 

She’s got no references, no previous experience. The beginning is slow going, circling want ads in the paper, like parts of the body to be altered in surgery, and she finds that some people will look at her odd if she tells them about the amnesia and the white-out with which her memory was coated over and they shift uncomfortably when she offers her left arm instead of her right in a handshake. The limb hangs uselessly to the side as a dead weight and some days she can feel it dragging her down. They tell her that they need background. _Have you ever been convicted of a felony?_ She guesses not. _What previous positions have you held?_ No idea. They stare down at the nearly blank application with annoyance and confusion but there’s a look in their eyes, vindication, she thinks, that now they have a reason not to hire the gimpy one.

 

Yet as she continues on, some things come back to her. She wonders how she can remember how to use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet but not her own name. But she gets a job working part time at a library full of quiet people who don’t look funny at her arm or her empty mind, and the money is good so she doesn’t complain.

 

\---

 

The lights here remind her of the hospital, florescent and too bright to hide the secrets of wrinkles and hollow eyes and no one looks good here. She knows that food is a necessity for life, the clawing growl in her stomach when she forgets is enough of a reminder, but there’s something about how everything here is plastic and bright and there’s cheesy music playing in the back ground and it all feels… not right.

 

A rotisserie chicken twirls a steady hum and she tries to hold down her breakfast.

 

She presses her fingers flush against the crinkly covering of two different loaves of bread, at least the wrapping claims they’re distinct, squishing them, one then the other, and hoping to figure out the disparity between the two. She feels like a little girl lost in a big world with bread to break but no way to tell and sometimes it seems like she’s drowning in it, all this newness and uncertainty and she just wants something to make a goddamn sandwich out of.

 

She finally puts the cheaper one in her basket and wheels it forward, thinking that that’s becoming a habit for them, because big numbers scare her and Joe can only work so many hours at the car mechanics’ down the hill. She doesn’t ask where he picked up that particular trade, but she’s finding out that there’s a lot she doesn’t know about him, and he about himself.

 

She doesn’t ask and it’s easier that way. 

 

\---

 

_There’s sand between her toes and she stumbles. She’s lost her shoes someplace between cabins and beach and her feet are bleeding from all the tiny scratches she’s gotten on the journey but there’s ocean and she’s happy. Suddenly there are arms, arms surrounding her and she didn’t realize her legs had buckled under her until they lift her up. Words are coming fast and slick to her ears but she doesn’t hear any of it and all she can think about is the baby._

_“Boat.”_

_But something holds her, carries her onto a raft where she drifts aimlessly for days, it seems. The world ends and then puts itself together and the Great Flood has come and gone but somehow she still doesn’t feel clean. They sail past a drowning fish and a bird tied up like a mummy in papers that say “rescue me” and she wishes she could help. But she’s only human now, even if before she’d been so much more and she feels empty without… without… she can’t think. _

_She cranes her neck to see the land they’d left but it’s too far gone and she wonders if it’s dipped its grassy, mountainous head beneath the water, but hide and seek is a childish game and she doesn’t have time for it so she looks forward again. Eventually they come to a giant, a metal god with sharp edges and flat planes and it picks her up, hoists her higher with strings and narrow, crooked fingers and she finds him there. He squirms and cries and it’s as if he knows that she’s been gone because his eyes are black like pools of oil and this isn’t hers. But she doesn’t have time to think about that because the great giant roars and then dies in a blaze of rotten glory._

_She can’t do much else but scream, yet someone rescues her and she can’t see his face. His face… his face… is blank. Like a mannequin, and she twists in his embrace because she thinks that maybe if she sees him in the right light she’ll be able to make out his features, but he holds her, both of them, close and she stops struggling. She feels safe here. _

His hand is on her hip when she wakes to a sweaty forehead and trembling fingers and she tries not to think about the connection between the two.

 

\---

 

The pan wobbles under her uncertain touch and she feels funny this way. She supposes this makes her domestic, all aprons and blenders and non-stick pans and this is new for her, something she can say about a lot of things these days. He quirks an eyebrow when he sees her, a blonde in a sun dress with a plate of meatloaf in her hand and she thinks that the plastic of her arm takes her one step closer to being Barbie.

 

“You made dinner?” He says it like she just sprouted tentacles, laying down the remote on the television and physically lifting his bad leg from the sofa so he can turn to look at her fully, and she creases her forehead in confusion.

 

“Isn’t this how it’s supposed to be?”

 

Because she doesn’t know a lot of things but she does know that in a normal world, when the boy comes home from work and settles in to do boy things, the girl makes dinner and they’ll eat, like usual and everyday and… normal.

 

He looks like he wants to question her, to unravel the logic behind her statement so they can get to the center and dissect the beating heart there, but instead he nods and helps her set the table with plastic utensils shellacked in flaking silver.

 

They may not have perfect, with a pink convertible and scar-less bodies and dream houses that face the ocean, and they may not even have normal, but she’s trying and it hurts when even that isn’t enough and she needs this, somehow. To know that sometimes she can be Barbie and he can be Ken and maybe everyone’s parts are plastic.

\---

 

The thin tank top allows the breeze from the window exposure to her skin underneath, causing her to shiver and wrap an arm around her stomach. It’s summer according to all available sources, but the nights are still chilly and cool the streets, allowing the sun to start it’s baking all over in the morning, but the day has set now and the city will sleep. She squeezes toothpaste onto her toothbrush which is resting carefully on the sink, and drags it back and forth across her teeth, careful to hit all the crevices on her way and spits the excess down the drain.

 

She can see him watching her out of the corner of her eye, behind her in the mirror, and she wonders what he’s thinking. That she could have been beautiful, maybe, before. That he wishes this had never happened to him, to her. But she stops herself because imagining his regrets is even worse than feeling her own settle heavy on her lungs and she just… can’t.

 

She studies him studying her and there’s no shame here, no modesty. He’s seen her bleed, heard her cry, watched her fall and claw at the ground, and she could say the same for him and there isn’t any humiliation in it. Her prosthesis is strewn across the toilet seat, rested there carefully because she can pretend all day that there isn’t anything wrong with her but in the end, when she comes home, all the wishing it was true hangs around her neck like the strap that keeps that thing on and it starts to strangle her. But he doesn’t flinch at the sight, at the stump or the mangled scars at the tip and it gives her courage. He waits there, in the shadows, until she needs someone to tie her hair back because she can’t do things like this for herself anymore, ever, and he’s careful not to snag and though his hands linger on her shoulders, he doesn’t say a word.

 

That night she dreams of a woman. A woman with brown curls and eyes green like dragons and envy and pity and she knows her. She knows her but she doesn’t recognize her face and the paradox knocks her off balance but she tries not to pay attention to silly dreams that don’t end up meaning anything more than dark circles under her eyes and déjà vu.

 

In the morning she watches him watching her make coffee and she thinks he’s beautiful.

 

\---

 

The bar reeks of cigarettes and cheap cologne, permeating the wood paneling and her clothes and her skin, smoking her out of the corners she’s been hiding in and causing her to throw her shoulders back, glaring at the ones that let their mouths hang open and smirking at those that try to hide it badly. He doesn’t pull the stool out for her and for that she’s grateful: she already needs more help than she’d like and it makes her tongue shrivel when people do things for her that she can do for herself.

 

She knows it isn’t fashionable but she orders tonic un-obliterated by alcohol because the idea of losing herself in something scares her more than she’d like. Joe feels differently, she can tell, because he orders two shots right off the bat and throws both of them back, resting his arm on the back of her chair like an after-thought.

 

Her eyes wander and rest on the television propped up near the ceiling, letting her eyes travel the field and dart along with the players there, having no understanding of the game but welcoming the distraction. There are times when she doesn’t need to think and observe, just wants a scene to occupy her eyes and let her mind travel to places unconscious and fleeting.

 

But the sports game ends abruptly in a near-tie score and she feels a bit cheated, trailing her eyes slowly downward, but something catches her eye and they jump back to the screen again.

 

The program has switched to the news, some story on a trial that the newscaster seems to find notable. But the girl. Woman, she should say. Her face is half covered by her glasses and partly by the shoulder of a reporter in front of the camera but there’s something… something… something familiar about her. When she stares at her face she sees beaches and helicopters and campfire light and the certainty of it all stamps marching patterns all of her brain in the steady beat of a kick-drum.

 

“Joe?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Do you recognize her?”

 

His gaze catches up with hers and there’s a something there that turns her insides cold. She wouldn’t say recognition because she doesn’t claim to reside in his head but there’s a flicker. He blinks to extinguish it quickly but it’s too late and she sees it and he looks away.

 

“Nope.”

 

“Yeah,” she agrees, still watching the woman’s slow progression through the crowd of spectators, “Me neither.”

 

They’re both lying and they both know it and she’s just so sure that if the girl trapped in the plastic box would take off her sunglasses she’d seen green and then she wouldn’t be able to ignore it.

 

\---

_She looks around and there’s nothing but matted leaves and fuzzy sky and she’s been here before, she knows it. The indistinct jungle twangs a deep chord somewhere inside of her but she hears footsteps and her instinct is to hide. The bush swallows her and she feels like a rabbit in a hole, the lips of earth towering higher and higher above her head until she can’t see reality any more. _

_But he pulls her out and she lets him once she sees it’s him, lets him dust her off and crumple under his arm, she a paper kept safe from the rain inside of his coat and her baby the wax seal that keeps it all together. Her face is buried in the crook of his arm and she feels safe here, but some conscious part of her awakes and she needs to see his face. _

_To trace the lines that have alluded her and to know him. _

_She frees herself and peers up at him and her heart stops. Her heart stops and she feels like she’s falling even though she can still feel her feet firmly planted on the jungle floor because it’s Joe and he’s here even though he isn’t supposed to be. His hair is shaggy instead of the clean cut style she’d woken to in the hospital but she knows it’s him, from before, before this whole thing, and that can’t be possible but it is. _

There’s a line, somewhere between wakefulness and dreams, and the distinction between the two is what keeps her sane these days and she should be the only one to walk the boundary line. She controls the border and when that starts to meld and shift she won’t be able to take it.

 

_“Joe?”_

_He shakes his head and she sucks in a breath, bracing._

_“Think on it, Mamacita. It’ll come around. It’ll always come back around.”_

 

She closes her eyes and counts to ten but she can still feel him and can still smell him, every where, and she wakes in their bed with his arms wrapped around her from behind, whispering to herself that _it means nothing, it mean nothing, it means nothing…_

 

\---

 

The sky is purple and bruised by twilight, tinting the passersby lavender and dusty.

 

They weave through the streets together, pausing less out of curiosity to look through the storefronts but more out of necessity; he can only walk for so long non-stop before his whole leg starts to throb. She wouldn’t tell him this because he would laugh and call her _precious_ like it’s an insult, but she enjoys walking like this with him. The idea that they can smirk at each other and share inside jokes and remark on gold fringed ottomans like they could afford or have any use for such things, and the people around them would be none the wiser. _They_ don’t know that their apartment is practically empty. Or that they met in the recovery ward of a hospital almost six months ago. Or that that’s as far back as their history goes. They don’t need to figure out such things and for just the fleeting second that they walk past, the two of them can be anyone they want to be. 

 

She’s smiling when she sees her.

 

She could say that pink nauseates her because it reminds her of Pepto Bismol, or that she doesn’t like babies because they cry to much, but her grin drops through to the pavement like ice cream off the cone, splashing there heavy and slushy. The stroller is coming from the opposite direction crossing the street and she sees tiny fingers and round cheeks and squirming limbs wrapped together in a pink blanket and she stops. She holds her breath.

 

It passes her, rolling through to her periphery and then out of her sight all-together but she still isn’t moving.

 

Everything comes flooding back to her all at once; the way she used to rock him in a wooden basinet, how he’d felt inside of her doing somersaults, the press of her fingers against his check, how scared she’d felt, even after he’d been cleaned off and handed back to her.

 

_“I have a son.” _

 

The headlights flood her already wide eyes and the car honks, an angry shout stirring her from her reverie. The crosswalk must have already counted down and turned red in an angry hand, so she scurries quickly to the other side. He’s waiting there, staring at her, curious and concerned, and she avoids his gaze because she knows how easily he picks her apart. But he sees her and he knows, knows what she’s thinking and why, somehow, unexplainably. He wraps an arm around her waist and holds her closer as she buries her head into his side, letting him steer them both to port.

 

\---

 

“I have nightmares.”

 

She glances up at him, over her cereal and over the table and over the wide chasm between.

 

“What?”

 

He shakes his head like she knew it all along and she probably did, some part of her that she’s locked away in a wooden chest and sank to the bottom of the sea.

 

“You know, nightmares. Scary things that haunt your sleep? That type of thing.”

 

She nods as a signal that she’s following, although she’s really not sure where he’s going with this.

 

“About what?”

 

“See there’s the thing: I’m not exactly sure. I know that it’s all up here-“ he taps his temple but nothing comes out the other side and he continues, “- but when I dream about it, it gets all jumbled up. None of it makes sense.”

 

“Oh.” She isn’t sure why she’s disappointed but the emotion creases over her mouth in a thin ironed line and she looks back down into her milk and the eight soggy Cheerios she still has left to eat.

 

“There’s an island though.” That gets her attention and he can tell, her quick glance up to meet his eyes giving him enough reason to go on. “And a ship. Got all blown up to pieces. Not sure how I got off it but, hey, it’s a dream right?” She shakes her head in an affirmative, even though she’s pretty sure it was a rhetorical question. “Anyway, here’s the weird part; you were there too. In the dream.”

 

She raises her eyebrows. “I was?”

 

“Yep. We were both on this Gilligan’s Island look-alike together, jungle and beach and all. But you had this… baby with you.”

 

She stills.

 

“A baby?”

 

“Yeah. Real cute, too. Can’t remember the tot’s name, though. Something biblical, I think. Of course I’m really not the one to ask about stuff like that. Not exactly a man of God myself.”

 

“And this was…” she chokes and she pretends it’s on the milk, her voice shrinking like the _drink me_ potion in Alice in Wonderland… “This was _my_ baby?” He nods. “It was my baby.”

 

“You ever wonder how they knew our names?”

 

“What?”

 

“Our names? They told us they didn’t know who we were, yet they called us by them from the second we woke up. I know we didn’t tip them off.”

 

She pauses because she’s stumped. In the haze of first lights and doctors and nurses she hadn’t really thought about it, just clung onto the one thing that was definite in a world of endless uncertainty.

 

“I’m not sure what-“

 

She kisses him to make him stop. Because he’s the only one propping her up and the only one to tear her down and because she’s starting to want him more than she needs him she just knows that means something. She kisses him because right now she doesn’t care about nightmares or past lives or whether maybe this all has importance on the grander scale of life and fate and the universe because she feels too small in the world for it to seem as if they have any effect on her in a tangible way.

 

He hesitates moments before he responds, before he lifts her up onto the table that had been between them, the one they’d gotten on sale at the flee market from an old woman with one tooth. Her knees part because she needs him closer, to feel him against her skin like water in the ocean, salting her wounds and purifying the parts of her soul that are still sticky with sweat and lies and the transgressions she still doesn’t remember. She holds her hand to the back of his head, flexing her fingers there and moaning at the nearness of him, not quite right where she needs him but close enough to taste.

 

Her words come out in a strangled sob, something along the lines of _oh god, please just just just_ and she’s glad that he doesn’t pause and ask her to think it over because now she can feel him, inside and out. He presses his hips to hers and they both groan in the same breath, him ground to the hilt and her reveling at the friction.

 

She can see it in his eyes even though she might try to ignore it; he worries that she’s trying to lose herself and he might be right. But he grips her hips and drives deeper in spite of his doubts, making her ache someplace rooted and buried. The table trembles under them but maybe it’s just her body because she’s tumbling over the edge, grabbing a hold of his shoulder to fight the gravity of it and he follows soon after, a stilted breathing creature with three arms and three legs and enough pain between them to wrestle an elephant to the ground.

 

The milk sloshed onto the table doesn’t leave a stain.

 

\---

 

The sky is sunny and bright like rubber ducks and bird eggs and ice cubes when the earth shifts back into another rotation.

 

Business is doing well at the auto mechanic and they like him (“God only knows why” he’ll mumble), and the library is expanding to another wing and they like her too (“Understandable”, he’ll grin), so when the one year lease comes up on the apartment they barely think twice before grabbing the classifieds instead of another contract. She giggles at the notion because this is different than the last time; they have lives and they know what they want instead of wandering aimlessly and they’re not just two strangers who met randomly in a hospital. She guesses this is what moving out of your parent’s house must feel like. She likes that she can say things with experience now. They hook up the new TV to cable and he clicks it on with a satisfied grin, flipping around the channels as she rearranges the cushions on the sectional sofa they just bought.

 

“”Maggie?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Can you…” he coughs and her spine twinges at the tone of his voice, sticking straight and alert, “… can you come here for a just second?”

 

Her feet thwack toward him, the television screen coming into view at the bend in his shoulder and she gasps lightly.

 

Bae, the man they’d practically grown up with in that hospital room, is walking across the screen with a woman she faintly recognizes, a baby in her arms and a smile of her face. The crawl reads _seventh Oceanic 815 survivor found _but she snatches the remote out of his limp hand and turns up the volume.

 

“… discovered at a grocery store in Malibu by a flight attendant who was supposed to be servicing 815 on the day of the crash, called authorities. He was reunited with his wife, of Oceanic 6 infamy, and their four month old daughter. It unknown how Mr. Kwon got to the states or where he has been for the past year since the other six were rescued, but more word on that as soon as we hear more information. If you are just joining us, the seventh survivor from the crash of Oceanic flight 815 has been discovered, shocking the nation and the world. The Oceanic Six had floated to the shore of an uncharted island and managed to scrape by there for nearly five months until they were rescued. All other passengers on that flight had been thought dead until this morning. It is unknown whether there are other survivors still alive from this famous crash, since the media had been assured earlier that the six were the only ones to make it off the plane. Authorities are searching and retracing Mr. Kwon’s steps over the last year, hoping to trace him back to his journey off the plane, and perhaps even back to more survivors. John?”

 

“Well that is a fascinating story, Julie. More on that as it develops. In the meantime, have you noticed the surge in airfare prices over the last-“

 

She clicks off the television, her eyes blank and opaque to the rapidly firing questions beneath. Sawyer breaches the space between them and takes her right hand in his, forgetting the denseness of the plastic there and gripping it like a baby doll, gentle and sure. She can still feel it though, the brush of his forearm on hers, and she’s grateful that he’s here, that she isn’t facing the clashing chaos alone.

 

So they stand there, hand in hand, staring at the black hole of the television screen, waiting for the world’s next move.

 

 


End file.
